Saturday, April 15, 2006

meta library

Note to self:

A meta library = the hypothetical aggregation of all possible libraries, in all languages, in all times -- including unorganized bits of information that exist in a "library" of miscellany (items such as your name when you draw it in water on the sidewalk by the swimming pool before the sun dries it away, grocery receipts, unrecorded audio, unrecorded smells, undocumented "realia"). It's a library of everything, almost totally un-navigable, un-searchable, un-measurable. Questions: is such a library useless? if so, a) how to make it useful? b) how to access it? Remember: the old Octavio Paz fable about the cartographers who make such a perfectly detailed map, that the map ends up the same size as the world it describes. And it's useless because it doesn't fit anywhere.

Okay. But what are the uses of thinking about this impossible library -- what's the meta-library good for as a thought experiment? What can it do that other things can't?